15 Years Ago, 'Godzilla' Was A Flop. By Today's Standards, It Would Be A Hit.

Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's Godzilla debuted in theaters fifteen years ago today. You may remember the film as both being terrible and being a box office disaster. But is the latter 'fact' true? Over Memorial Day 1996, Mission: Impossible had set a record by grossing $75 million in its first six days. Now, just two summers later, Godzilla debuted with $74 million over six days and was declared... a gigantic flop? Yes, despite earning a near-record $74 million over the Memorial Day holiday, the critically-trashed Godzilla was declared a summer loser mostly because it didn't actually break any records during its much-anticipated opening weekend. 15 years later, its a strange blockbuster case study. With the numbers it had in 1998, especially when adjusted for inflation, Godzilla would be a hit by today's standards.

Yes, those of us old enough to remember the summer of 1998 surely recall a year of teases leading up to what was supposed to be the top film of summer 1998. Emmerich and Devlin were fresh off Independence Day and they were allegedly going to deliver the Godzilla movie to top them all. There were two teasers released in theaters alongside Men In Black in July 1997 and Starship Troopers in November 1997. The full trailer dropped on April 3rd, 1997, attached to prints of Mercury Rising. What these three trailers had in common was simple: They all lacked a remotely decent look at the title monster. Sure if you read Ain't It Cool News, Dark Horizons, or Coming Attractions back in the day you might have seen leaked sketches or storyboards but, up until the film's opening night,
Sony successfully kept the masses in the dark about what their GCI-created version of Gojira would look like.

Like Star Trek Into Darkness, the 'mystery box' approach somewhat backfired when there wasn't much in the box worth hiding. The film landed with a thud over that long weekend, disappointing audiences with its terrible characterizations and general lack of true monster movie mayhem. I was there at an advance Tuesday night screening. I remember the disappointment well. It caused me to coin what I called 'The Godzilla Rule', which merely states that you shouldn't open a film on a Wednesday if it's bad, because word-of-mouth will sink in by Friday and harm the overall opening weekend. Still, the film pulled a solid $44 million Fri-Sun total, a $55 million Fri-Mon holiday gross, and a $74 million six-day gross.

The picture fizzled after opening weekend, dropping 59% in weekend two and ending up with $138 million domestic off of a $130 million budget. Heck, it ended up grossing less in the states than the alleged summer kick-off film, Deep Impact ($140 million), which was supposed to be a curtain raiser for the main event. StarWars.com even put out a satirical poster mocking the film's "Size Does Matter" tag line as an unsubtle advertisement for the next summer's Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. The film was but a punchline by summer's end, eclipsed by the likes of Armageddon and There's Something About Mary,Saving Private Ryan, and The Mask of Zorro.

But looking at the cold numbers, it would seem that Godzilla was far from a flop. It was a film like King Kong ($550 million on a $210 million budget) or Waterworld (which eventually broke even thanks to robust overseas grosses), a would-be blockbuster that made quite a bit of money but was deemed a failure due to perhaps unreasonable expectations. Again, comparisons to Star Trek Into Darkness are not unreasonable.

Just looking at its "opening weekend", it earned more in its first six days than any film released at that time aside from Mission: Impossible ($74.9 million), Men In Black ($91 million), The Lost World: Jurassic Park ($103 million), and Independence Day ($104 million). Adjusted for inflation, its six-day run would be around $125 million even without what would be a surefire 3D conversion. Its $138 million total in America may have been "disappointing", but the film grossed $242 million overseas giving the film a global total of $379 million, good for third-place in 1998. In 2005, the $375 million worldwide gross for the $150 million Batman Begins got us The Dark Knight. And the $396 million global gross for the $175 Snow White and the
Huntsman counts has a franchise starter, with a sequel on the way.

Heck, if you play the inflation game, Godzilla's 1998 number equal around $230 million domestic and $403 million overseas, for a spectacular $633 million worldwide total on a film that cost $130 million back in 1998 and would arguably cost $219 million today (that's not even factoring in 15 years of overseas box office expansion and probable 3D upcharges). If these numbers look like plausible optimistic final grosses for Pacific Rim or even the upcoming Godzilla reboot coming on May 16, 2014, you'd be right. In 1998, the $130 million Godzilla grossed nearly three times its budget purely on worldwide theatrical grosses alone. That's the very definition of a solid box office hit. We can still argue that the film was a failure in terms of its quality and entertainment value. But we must also remember that the film was crowded a disaster on its opening weekend, a Memorial Day weekend that was actually near the top of the record books at that time, purely because it was inexplicably expected to surpass the record $90 million Fri-Mon Memorial Day weekend gross of The Lost World: Jurassic Park from the year before. Today it is a pop culture triviality of sorts.

It's neither an underrated gem in need of a critical second wind nor is it so bad that it survives as an ironic viewing experience. It fails because it's neither cheesy enough for 'the fans' nor committed to being truly scary and violent in a way that would resonate with modern audiences. But in terms of its box office, it serves as a lesson about lowering expectations and a sober exhibit of declining attendance and inflation. There is a reason why studios pitch lowered expectations for their films while rival studios often try to raise those goal posts. Sony spent a year boasting that they had the unquestionable summer box office champion and thus they were smacked down when the film merely did 'very good' at the worldwide box office. Today the studios desperately try to spin opening weekend projections as low as possible so they can bask in 'surprise' when the film 'over performs'. In the summer of 1998, Godzilla was considered an artistic failure and a box office loser. By today's standards, they'd still be half-right.

I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing ...